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I do improvisational theater. I’ve been doing it at an amateur level for three years now. My favourite exercise is to stand on stage, in front of an audience, and be given a word or sentence. Then, I have to spontaneously tell or act some kind of story revolving around that word or sentence, lasting exactly thirty seconds.

Like, someone says Asparagus and I’ll act a scene where I put on some boots, gloves and a radiation suit, open a fridge and complain about my spouse’s cooking.

Of course, when you have to do something like this, you simply cannot plan in advance everything you are going to do before you start. In fact, you can’t even plan how it is going to end. You just don’t have time to think in that split second between the moment you hear the word and the moment you start acting. You have to start acting right away. So, choose an action and do it. Anything. You hear Asparagus and you start tying your shoes slowly because you just feel like it. This leaves you a few seconds to think about who your character is, and why he is taking that specific action.

Once you have a good character in mind, it’s easier to act in character, even without a clear objective. This leaves you with some time to choose that objective and decide how the act will end. You will spend about fifteen seconds looking for an idea, so you just have to have a character or you’ll be naked.

There are good characters and bad characters. A bad character is a noun. A policeman. A chef. An extraterrestrial. A lightbulb. A good character is a noun and an adjective. An allergic policeman. A sexy chef. A tax-evading extraterrestrial. An imaginary lightbulb. The adjective adds depth to the character : that’s where great acting and great ideas come from. In fact, the further apart you choose your noun and adjective, the greater the potential. A policeman whose defining characteristic is allergies is a lot more unusual than a policeman whose defining characteristic is strength.

This also works outside of improvisational theater. It is by combining ideas from different areas of life, in ways that seem completely crazy, that entire philosophies and ways of understanding emerge.

Applying insight you get from a certain area to another will improve your knowledge and understanding of the latter.

On the other hand, we’ve been incessantly told that analogies are a bad idea. Smart, credible people have determined that you need ten thousand hours to become an expert at anything. Movies show that you can’t just copy-paste your expertise as a fisherman to be a loving and caring father. An expert baseball coach, no matter how experienced, will never be able to understand nuclear physics by applying his baseball expertise.

The natural reaction of anyone is to take their experience from whatever area they are an expert in, and use it to improve their skill in a new area they are beginning to discover. This never works. You just end up with baseball loonies explaining quantum mechanics in terms of batting averages.

By definition, when applying your experience to an area you are unfamiliar with, you cannot tell if what you are doing is right or wrong.

On the other hand, learning about baseball might just give a quantum scientist that little nudge in the right direction to form a new theory or solve a difficult problem. The history of science is filled with epiphanies that came from completely unexpected directions.

So, stop thinking about your job all the time. Do something new, like baseball or fishing or improvisational theater or knitting or reading yaoi fanfics. And every time you see something new, ask yourself what it teaches about your own craft. When everyone around you does a good job, be the one who does an allergic job.

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